He has beaten his expected points in 3 of 3 seasons. Whether that is a skill or a countdown decides what he is worth at 69.5 overall.
Sam LaPorta scored 106.9 fantasy points in 2024. The volume he earned was worth 89. That gap of 17.9 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 69.5 overall.
Rather than reading a season average, it is worth finding the point the season actually turned. Our shift detector flags in-season changes large enough to clear a statistical threshold, then asks what moved around them.
The largest single move was Week 5: receiving TDs went up from 0 to 0.6, at 2.45 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offence surged.
Year over year the engine classifies 2024 as a stable year. That is the label to carry into the projection, because it separates a player who lost snaps from one who kept them and converted worse.
He finished 11.88 points per game on 49 targets — a 5.3% jump on his 2024 rate with DET. Every part of that is real and none of it is in dispute.
What is worth separating is how much of it he earned. Expected points strip out the finishing and ask a narrower question: given the targets he drew, where they came from on the field, and how far downfield they travelled, what was that usage worth? For 2024 the answer was 89 points — 9.9 per game. He scored 17.9 more than that, a 20.1% overshoot.
The expected line underneath the season was 65.9 catches for 677 yards and 4.3 touchdowns, and he cleared it.
The expected line was 65.9 catches for 677 yards and 4.3 touchdowns. He finished with 40, 489 and 3.
49% of the entire gain came from catches alone. He hit 72% of his expected receiving yards and 70% of his expected touchdowns — and 61% of his expected catches.
Not one of his 16 games cleared 25 points. His best was 18.4 in Week 17. He wins with volume rather than with weeks that swing a matchup.
A steady floor has its own value in a lineup that needs one. 7 games came in under 10 points, including Week 1 against LA (8.5) and Week 2 against TB (3.3).
The three largest overshoots — Week 6 (+10.4), Week 8 (+6.2), Week 10 (+5) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
3 of his 3 seasons ran hot: 2023 (+11.7%), 2024 (+20.3%), 2025 (+20.1%). Across all 3 he has scored 80 points more than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read is regression. Finishing above expectation is unstable, and a player who does it repeatedly is usually one whose luck has not run out yet.
But an expected-points model has a specific blind spot, and it is worth naming: it converts usage at league-average rates. A target twenty yards downfield is worth what the average receiver does with a target twenty yards downfield. If a player is reliably better than average at winning a particular kind of target, he will beat the model every single year, and calling that luck is just mislabelling a skill.
So the question is not whether he beat the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Across 288 targets and four seasons, he has been a fundamentally different receiver depending on what the defence played. Against man he has caught 70.3% for 7.39 yards per target and 0.361 expected points added per target. Against zone: 76.5%, 8.58 yards, 0.45 EPA.
That is a gap of -0.089 EPA per target on a sample of 118 man targets against 170 zone. The catch rate goes the other way — he catches more against zone — which is exactly what you would expect from a receiver whose value is in winning contested downfield throws rather than in finding soft spots underneath.
The shell detail sharpens it. Cover 1, single-high man is the look he has faced most: 98 targets, 7.29 yards per target, 0.233 EPA. His best is Cover 3 at 0.615 on 59 targets.
The weakness is specific. Against Cover 6 he has caught 73.3% for 8.53 yards a target and 0.181 EPA across 15 looks — a gap of 0.4 expected points a target between his best coverage and his worst.
This does not prove the overshoot repeats. It does mean the pattern has a stated cause rather than being a coin that keeps landing heads.
Across 50 graded prop lines, he has gone over 48.0% of the time. On receptions specifically the number is 40.0% across 25 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 0.7%.
That cuts against him. A book that has him beaten 60% of the time on his most-graded market is not a market being slow — it is a market that has him priced correctly and a player who keeps falling short of it.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 35.3% rate and he converted at 36.0% — a gap of 0.7 points, which is noise.
Detroit returns 5 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, rb1, te1, hc — with Jared Goff at quarterback, Dan Campbell as head coach and Drew Petzing calling it. The offence projects to 33.86 pass attempts a game at medium confidence.
The pie is stable. His slice is the question. Our share model has him at 15.2% against the 19.1% he ran, with a range of 13.7% to 17.7%.
That number is built from 25 comparable players — same age band, same prior share, same team, same coordinator — not from a depth chart. The closest three went Sam LaPorta 19.1% to 18.5%, George Kittle 20.5% to 18.5%, Jake Ferguson 17% to 17.4%. Two held, one fell hard.
Across 4,488 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. target share (r 0.247), WOPR (r 0.218), air-yards share (r 0.142) carry. receiving EPA per game (r -0.127) and yards per target (r -0.114) and week-to-week volatility (r -0.075) run negative — a player who was hyper-efficient on low volume tends to come back down, so a gaudy per-touch number is a warning rather than a selling point.
So the figures worth weighing for him: a 18.5% target share, 17.5% of the air yards, a WOPR of 0.4, on the field for 90.7% of snaps. He averaged 3.2 yards of separation against 5.44 yards of cushion, and gained 0.59 yards after the catch above expectation. He finished 29 at the position — TE3.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offences beat theirs systematically. Over 105 games, DET has come in +1.99 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 53% of weeks.
That is a real structural tailwind. Every skill player in this offence gets a small, repeatable bonus the market prices late.
One related finding worth carrying: across 1,280 cases we measured what happens after a team's implied total slides, and the correlation is -0.37 — negative, meaning the market over-corrects. A falling team total is more often a buying window than a warning.
Our board has him at 169.3 points, 11.1 per game across 15.2 expected games — 62.9 catches, 728 yards, 5.6 touchdowns. That is TE3, 78 overall, and 15 points of value over a replacement starter.
It is a step down from 2024, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.
also recovering (back), but on a healthier timeline than Kraft and expected fully cleared for camp. The offense remains excellent (easiest schedule, dome, high-powered passing), but target-share ceiling is capped by real internal competition (Amon-Ra, Gibbs, Jameson Williams, and a rookie WR all also commanding volume). His weekly floor looks mediocre by raw two-year usage trend, but the team is good enough that a single injury to someone ahead of him in the pecking order could immediately make him a league-winning share.
That is the current read. It is a change — in 2026-06-05 the position was HESITANT: Talented, but he lives in the mid-round TE range that's historically a losing bet, and production has dipped (mostly injury). Early-8th is roughly fair, not a target.…
It rests on one of our draft principles:
The books do not agree on him. . That 12-pick gap between Yahoo and Underdog is the practical thing to act on: in a Underdog-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 69.5 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 12 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on underdog and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 76.4, espn 66.5, yahoo 64.4, underdog 91.6, cbs 70.7.
At 69.5 you are paying a WR2 price for a player whose median outcome is a WR2 season with five weeks that win you the game outright and four that lose it. The bust rate of 13% is real and so is the 30% boom rate.
The call: fair value, not a discount. The reason to take him is the ceiling and the betting record. The reason to pass is that you are buying a profile that has beaten its expected output four years running and only needs to stop once.
Ask the Coach about Sam LaPorta Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.Expected points are computed from realised usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 50 graded lines. Projections are anchored to consensus with our engine applied as a capped tilt; the raw engine figure is stated where it differs. Nothing here is betting advice.